What is it about the Sunshine Coast? We attract and nurture artists like few other places. It would be fair to say that our yards and woods, garages, suites, barns, and sheds contain more creative space than almost anywhere else. Our Art Crawl, which opens studios and galleries to visitors in one wild and exuberant weekend, is something that gets bigger every year and that visitors and locals mark on their calendars.
From Jeff Barringer’s bold abstracts to Marleen Vermeulen’s reverent forest- and seascapes, from Pia Sillem’s tender, evocative natural shapes, to Patrick Skidd’s installations that are layered with both meaning and colour, the Sunshine Coast’s visual artists show depth, diversity, and mastery.
Maybe the creative force, the energy of becoming, channels particularly strongly here. Our forests grow big and our dreams, our imaginations, feel similarly boundless. Marleen Vermeulen believes the energy (and the chaos) in nature are vital to her large-scale, complex work. She calls nature “my biggest teacher.”
“Having looked at a square foot of forest floor, witnessed the chaos created by leaves, branches, bark, moss, rocks and soil, I’m now recreating that experience on my canvas.”
Pia Sillem similarly finds inspiration for her pottery everywhere she looks. “I’m still fascinated with nature. The unexpected little treasures I find on the forest floor. The shapes of fallen leaves and empty seeds. Textures of bark or decaying bits of wood. Mushrooms in their different stages of growth. Buds of flowers or leaves unfolding . . . I find endless inspiration walking through the woods!”
People come here to finally get serious about their craft, and they find a community that welcomes new beginnings and respects a commitment to the creative life. That commitment means different things at different stages. It can mean a commitment to technique, to long hours of practice and study, false starts and finding a mentor, a commitment to time and solitude, or a commitment to letting go of all that and feeling for what is right.
